1. The Post reported Sunday that President Donald Trump refused to respect and honor the memory of John McCain, who died over the weekend, by calling the fighter pilot, prisoner of war, and popular member of the United States Senate a “hero.” washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…

2. This morning, while flags in Washington and elsewhere were flying in McCain’s honor at half mast, the flag atop the White House was conspicuously flying at full mast.

3. By the time you read this newsletter, I’m guessing you will have read many ways of explaining Trump’s extraordinary behavior, virtually all of them uncharitable to a president who once said that he likes war heroes who don’t get captured. washingtonpost.com/news/post-poli…

4. But I want to point out what I think is a persuasive explanation that typically escapes attention. Donald Trump won’t honor John McCain, because if he does, he will look weak, and he can’t have that. In the president’s mind, the president is strong.

5. Why would Trump look weak for honoring the memory of a respected senator? To answer that, we have to go back to the foundation of the Trump-McCain feud.

The story is usually told this way.

6. To Trump voters, McCain was a symbol of the establishment, a reminder of why the GOP could not advance a truly conservative agenda during the Barack Obama years. Trump’s 2016 victory repudiated the GOP establishment and its status quo.

7. Moreover, McCain deserved being Trump’s punching bag in the mind of Trump’s supporters. Not only did he defy Trump by defending what he believed were timeless principles.

8. He defied Trump by being the lone holdout to repealing Obamacare, something the GOP had promised to do. For Trump loyalists, McCain’s thumbs-down vote proved their suspicions. It justified their savagery and validated Trump’s.

9. While the above is partly true, it’s not the whole truth.

10. Fact is, McCain was as partisan as anyone else. With rare exception, as with campaign finance and Obamacare, he voted with his party virtually every time. That includes voting for the tax overhaul and confirming Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

11. Trump loyalists pilloried McCain for downright primitive reasons. To them, McCain was scared, and in being scared, he was weak. In being weak, McCain was contemptible.

12. Meanwhile, the president wasn’t scared. He was man enough to say things no one else would say for fear of offending the political correctness police.

13. And in being man enough to say what needed saying, he won.

Scared? John McCain?

14. That’s not what most people saw in 2008 when McCain, then running for president, told a wild-eyed conservative voter she was wrong about calling Obama an “Arab.”

15. She was wrong, in other words, for reaching into that bottomless well of right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theory, and bringing what she found to the public.

16. “No, ma’am,” he said. “No, ma’am.”

Obama is a decent family man, a citizen, whom he happened to disagree with.

“That’s what this campaign is about.”

17. While most people saw principle, respect, and American decency (indeed, this was a defining moment for both parties), future Trump voters saw fear. Worse, weakness.

18. Here was a so-called Republican who could have brutalized publicly the first black man to make a credible run for president of the United States, but chose not to.

19. To Trump loyalists, McCain was too scared of offending an establishment in thrall to politically correct values. He was too scared of “telling it like it is,” of “saying what everyone’s thinking,” and of “breaking the rules.”

20. To them, this was tantamount to being a liberal, which means McCain was worse than a Republican In Name Only. A former prisoner of war, a man who would not go home until other prisoners were released, was a traitor to "real Americans."

21. Trump believes racism makes him strong. McCain knew better. Yes, by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, he helped lay the foundation for what would become Donald Trump’s GOP.

22. But McCain himself didn’t have to be a racist to be strong. He stood for something, whether you liked it or not, not merely against it.

1. Odds are the president is going to go on television tonigh to announce that he’s going to agree to reopen the government after 17 days of closure while simultaneously invoking national emergency powers allowing him to bypass Congress to start building a wall on the border.

2. If this happens, and it’s still an if, you’re going to hear plenty of people react in ways that range from concern to alarm to fear to outright panic. Some will accuse Donald Trump of trying to be an American dictator.

3. Others will argue, I think correctly, that the president is abusing the constitutional powers of his office, reinforcing the claim that he’s unfit to rule and sending him one further step toward removal.

1. @billscher touches a conventional wisdom that I keep chewing on. "Loyalists always seem satisfied ... so long as he is fighting. Winning has been secondary." I said the same two weeks ago, but the longer this shutdown goes on, the more I think the wall really matters.

2, If fighting were all that mattered, he would have caved already, no? If the wall really matters, then this could go on for a long--long--time. I guess we'll see.

Per @Politico Playbook: “why has PRESIDENT DONALD #TRUMP not spoken with Pelosi since Dec. 11? That's 18 days without contact between the president and the incoming speaker during a federal government shutdown.

“The White House has not reached out to Pelosi's staff to try to schedule a get together. There has been no outreach to Pelosi at all from VP MIKE PENCE or INTERIM CHIEF OF STAFF MICK MULVANEY.” politico.com/playbook

BREAKING: The White House has said that US President #Trump is canceling his upcoming South America trip to remain in the US "to oversee the American response to Syria." - @NBCNews

This sounds like the US is planning to strike #Syria and Trump will remain in the US to closely monitor responses by #Russia. This is terrible.

BREAKING - British forces are now mobilizing at their bases in #Cyprus for strikes against #Syria. It appears very likely that the US, France and U.K. will strike Syria in the next 24 hours. This is dreadful.

National politics correspondent for Newsweek, Nina Burleigh, with a fun find on a TV above the bar at the Trump Hotel DC bit.ly/2E37QRR

Two errors in the 2nd graf of Breitbart's Trump Hotel DC article:
-holdings aren't out of @realDonaldTrump's hands: trust isn't blind & he can profit from it
-Trump Org told Congress it was estimating foreign receipts—not auto donating in fullbit.ly/2CpL7z2